Other tools

etckeeper — Intended to version-control system-wide configuration in /etc. Works by keeping track of permissions and modes which version-control software often ignores. Can use various SCM systems as a backend. Hooks can auto-commit changes to the repository before a system-upgrade; for pacman, these hooks currently have to be triggered manually.

vcsh — Allows separating differents modules (e.g., Emacs config vs. zsh config) into individual repositories which can be maintained separately, as opposed to keeping all dotfiles in a single repository. Works with git only.

yadm — Manages files across systems using a single Git repository. Provides a way to use alternate files on a specific OS or host. Supplies a method of encrypting confidential data so it can safely be stored in your repository.

Maintaining dotfiles across multiple machines

Reason: This and the section below need a rewrite (Discuss in Talk:Dotfiles#)

One way of maintaining dotfiles across various machines across various hosts while still allowing for per-host customizations, is by maintaining a master-branch for all shared configuration, while each individual machine has a machine-specific branch checked out. Host-specific configuration can be committed to the machine-specific branch; as shared configuration is added to the master-branch, the per-machine branches are then rebased on top of the updated master.

Another approach is to put machine-specific configuration into specially commented blocks and to use qualia to automatically uncomment them on each machine. This approach requires less manual work and doesn't cause merge conflicts.

Confidential information

Occasionally, software may keep plain-text passwords in configuration files, as opposed to hooking into a keyring. In these cases, git clean-filters may be handy to avoid accidentally commiting confidential information. E. g., the following .gitattributes file assigns a filter to the file “some-dotfile”:

# .gitattributes
some-dotfile filter=remove-pass

Whenever the file “some-dotfile” is checked into git, git will invoke the filter “remove-pass” on the file before checking it in. The filter must be defined in .git/config, e. g.: